Ex-Olympic Athlete Indicted in Global Smuggling Scheme

A former Olympic athlete from Iraq has been charged with running a global scheme to smuggle hundreds of Middle Easterners into the United States, according to Justice Department officials in El Paso, where a federal indictment was unsealed Thursday.

George Tajirian, 56, a Mexico City resident who rode as a bicyclist on Iraq’s 1968 Olympic team, allegedly used his own travel agencies in Cuba and Ecuador to smuggle more than 250 illegal immigrants across the Texas-Mexico border over the last two years--most of them from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, according to U.S. authorities.

“This is a big step forward for our crackdown on alien smuggling,” Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said.

Also named in the seven-count indictment were Tajirian’s wife, Maria Soledad Martinez Rangel; Katia Anbousi, a Lebanese citizen who worked at Tajirian’s travel office in Ecuador; and Salvador Moreno, an employee of the Mexican Immigration Service at the Mexico City airport. As of Thursday, only Tajirian was in custody. He was being held at a federal detention center near El Paso. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 70 years in prison.

Despite the fact that many of Tajirian’s customers traveled from countries that have been accused of exporting terrorism, no allegation of terrorist activity was included in the indictment. “We have presented no evidence, nor are prepared to show any evidence, to that effect,” said Bill Bragg, U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas.

Authorities described the case as the first big success of Operation Global Reach, an anti-smuggling effort that placed 40 Immigration and Naturalization Service agents in 13 overseas offices last year. Tajirian’s arrest, which took the work of four domestic and four international INS bureaus, represents “one of the largest global smuggling cases conducted to date along the Southwest border,” said Luis Garcia, director of the INS office in El Paso.

According to the indictment, Tajirian flew around the world to meet his customers, charging them from $10,000 to $15,000 apiece for counterfeit documents, then transporting them from the Middle East across Latin America to the Texas border. For $4,000 to $10,000 more, he would guide them to their ultimate destination--usually Detroit, New York, Las Vegas or Los Angeles, the indictment charged.

The investigation was launched 16 months ago, after INS inspectors in El Paso detained two illegal immigrants: a Syrian with bogus documents and a Jordanian who falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen. But authorities now believe that Tajirian’s smuggling ring had been in business for quite some time, perhaps as long as 20 years.